Object storage has become one of the most important aspects of today's storage solutions and challenges. Object storage has become the preferred mode of storage for many applications due to factors such as non-hierarchical layouts resulting in better scalability, faster retrieval times, inherent simplicity in the access protocols, and greater overall cost-effectiveness. Traditional storage stacks, using hard disk drives and conventional file systems, were modified to accommodate object storage and their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), but such traditional storage stacks were not optimized for object storage and access due to the complexities of generic file-system layers, multi-protocol handling (Network File System (NFS), Server Message Block (SMB), and/or block access, for example), distributed locking, etc. While the use of object APIs and their storage has been exploding, especially with the advent of the Cloud and an ecosystem of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), existing stacks do not sufficiently leverage the object format and its simplicity to achieve the best scale and performance versus cost ratios possible.
A need remains for a way to use object storage to offer better access and cost-effectiveness.